WILL Policies

Illinois Public Media

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Media Matters with Bob McChesney

Media Matters featured host Bob McChesney in conversation with a variety of guests. The program ended production with the Oct. 7, 2012, show. McChesney is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Long time friend and colleague of Bob, John Nichols joins Bob this Sunday.

His most recent book, Uprising, captures the protest movement that captivated the nation and paved the path for Occupy Wall Street. More than 100,000 public employees, teachers, students, and their allies descended on the capital in Madison, Wisconsin after Governor Scott Walker announced his plan to eliminate the right of public sector employees to unionize. Uprising provides an anatomy of the event and its implications for the political future of the nation. As state legislatures across the US (in Ohio and New Hampshire, to name a few) take up union busting measures, Nichols shows how the Wisconsin case is a blueprint for progressives around America who’ve had enough. Uprising will be on of the thank you gifts to Media Matters supporters who contribute in the upcoming pledge drive.

Over the past decade, he has co-authored with Bob It's the Media, Stupid!, Our Media, Not Theirs, Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy and, most recently, The Death and Life of American Journalism. McChesney and Nichols are the co-founders of Free Press, the nation's media-reform network, which organizes the biennial National Conferences on Media Reform.

Norman Solomon wrote the nationally syndicated "Media Beat" weekly column from 1992 to 2009. His latest book, "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State," documents five decades of rising American militarism and the media’s all-too-frequent failure to challenge it. Solomon's unique weave of personal narrative and historical inquiry, Daniel Ellsberg notes in the foreword, “helps us understand where we are now and how we got here.” Solomon's book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," was the basis of a documentary of the same name released in 2007.

Solomon is the founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts. He is also the co-founder and Senior Fellow of RootsAction, an online initiative dedicated to galvanizing Americans who are committed to economic fairness, equal rights, civil liberties, environmental protection -- and defunding endless wars. He recently ran a 2012 congressional campaign for California's 6th congressional district.

Josh Silver, CEO of United Republic, is a veteran election and media reform executive. He was the campaign manager for the successful 1998 Arizona Clean Elections (public funding) ballot initiative campaign and is the cofounder along with Bob McChesney and John Nichols, and former CEO of Free Press, the nation’s leading media and technology reform advocacy organization. He was the director of development for the cultural arm of the Smithsonian Institution.

Josh has published widely on media, telecommunications, campaign finance and other public policy issues. Silver has been profiled the Wall Street Journal and featured in outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Salon.com, C-SPAN, and NPR. He speaks regularly on media and technology issues and blogs at The Huffington Post.

Prolific writer and journalist Chris Hedges joins us this Sunday to discuss his newest book, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt." In collaboration with graphic artist, Joe Stacco, Hedges investigates the impact of unfettered capitalism on American life. Part graphic novel, part journalistic narrative, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," offers a unique glimpse into the American experience living in the capitalist state.

Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.

Susan Saladoff (Producer, Director) spent twenty-five years practicing law in the civil justice system, representing injured victims of individual and corporate negligence. She stopped practicing law in 2009 to make the documentary, HOT COFFEE, her first feature-length film. She began her career as a public interest lawyer with the law firm of Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, now known as Public Justice, an organization that, for the last 25 years, has been at the forefront of keeping America’s courthouse doors open to all. Susan was recognized by her peers as an Oregon Super Lawyer for five consecutive years from 2006 to 2010. She is a graduate of Cornell University and George Washington University Law School, and has frequently lectured at the state and national levels on the importance of the civil justice system. Copies of the DVD at hotcoffeethemovie.com or queue the film on Netflix.

David Sirota is a journalist, nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist, award-winning radio host and bestselling author living in Denver, Colorado. As a regular contributor to Salon.com, Sirota covers the intersection of politics, media and popular culture. In reviews of his writing, the New York Times called Sirota a “populist rabble-rouser” with a “take-no-prisoners mind-set.” In 2010, The Nation magazine named Sirota one of the 30 Media Heroes in America.

Sirota’s first two books (Hostile Takeover and The Uprising) were both New York Times bestsellers. His third book, Back to Our Future, was released in March of 2011 to strong reviews. As a magazine writer, Sirota has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Salon and The Nation. He is also senior editor at In These Times magazine and Huffington Post contributor, and appears periodically on CNN, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, MSNBC, and National Public Radio.

Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist and syndicated columnist, author and host of the daily, independent global news hour, Democracy Now!, which airs on more than 1,070 public television and radio stations worldwide. A driving force in the movement to rebuild the public media landscape, Democracy Now! presents people and perspectives rarely heard in the corporate media.

Goodman's fifth book, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, written with Denis Moynihan, will be published this fall. This timely sequel to her fourth New York Times bestseller, Breaking the Sound Barrier, gives voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power-- and refusing to be silent. She co-authored her first three bestsellers, Standing Up to the Madness, Static, and The Exception to the Rulers, with her brother, journalist David Goodman.

If social change is a two-step process—first, those seeking change must convince the public that the current system should not be trusted; then, new social and legal structures must be put in place—we are now caught in a strange limbo between stage one and two. Chris Hayes' new book, Twilight of the Elites challenges us to imagine a different social order, to construct coalitions, institutions, and constituencies that militate not only against the status quo, but for equality. “This is the cycle of a dynamic society,” Hayes writes. “Equality is never a final stage, democracy never a stable equilibrium: they are processes, they are struggles. Our task now is to recognize that the struggle is ours.”

Chris Hayes is an American political commentator. Hayes hosts Up with Chris Hayes, a weekend opinion television show on MSNBC.

Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World”, Dave Zirin writes about the politics of sports for the Nation Magazine. He is their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Winner of Sport in Society and Northeastern University School of Journalism's 2011 'Excellence in Sports Journalism' Award, Zirin is also the host of Sirius XM Radio’s popular weekly show, Edge of Sports Radio. He has been called “the best sportswriter in the United States,” by Robert Lipsyte. Dave Zirin is, in addition, a columnist for SLAM Magazine and the Progressive.

His most recent book, in collaboration with Dr. John Carlos, is The John Carlos Story, published by Haymarket Books in September 2011.

Glenn Greenwald is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of three New York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of America's two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning.